The Kobold Adventure Story
The Kobold Adventure Story
by Josh Dean
To call Mike Kobold’s life unusual is to underrate the man. This eccentric, almost impossibly cheerful and optimistic German-born resident of Pittsburgh has already led the life of many men and he’s just 30.
I first met Kobold in the name of journalism. An editor of mine at Inc., the nation’s preeminent magazine for entrepreneurs, sent me an email that said, “Do you know anything about this watchmaker?” and provided a link to the Kobold Watch website. My first thought was, “A watchmaker? Yawn.” But I rang the number and got Mike and by the end of the call I had a notepad full of scribbles like: “Friends with Jim Gandolfini?!…Hunted Nazi war criminals?!…Ran a marathon with Ranulph Fiennes?!”
I thought for sure the guy was a con man, but that was the first and last time I underestimated Mike Kobold. To paraphrase the old saw about unbelievable people: If Mike Kobold didn’t exist I’d have had to make him up.
He started a watch company in his dorm room with virtually no money, built it into a successful luxury brand and one day picked up his phone to find a man named James Gandolfini on the other line looking to buy a watch. Kobold, who doesn’t have cable and probably couldn’t name five celebrities if you gave him two hours and a copy of US Weekly, had no idea who he was talking to. But because he sometimes hand delivers watches to unsuspecting first-time buyers, and because he loves an excuse to shatter the speed limit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, ventured to the New York City set of a TV show he’d never heard of, asked for “the fat guy” (Gandolfini’s description) and today the two men are best friends, which sounds weird until you meet Kobold. After that you’re pretty sure anything is possible, no matter how untrue it sounds.
Mike Kobold just wakes up, goes about his life, and strange (mostly good) things just happen to him. His other best friend is Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the World’s Greatest Adventurer as proclaimed by the Guinness Book and a man Kobold met when he was dispatched by his high school to pick up Fiennes, the school’s guest speaker, at the airport. Fiennes would come to call himself Kobold’s uncle, introducing his adopted nephew to a spirit of adventure that meshed nicely with Kobold’s already unusual luck and propensity for jumping into things without considering the consequences.
That the Kobold Watch Company is known for supporting adventure and is beloved by rugged sorts like cops, soldiers, explorers, and other men who tempt death for fun or profit has much to do with this friendship.
Fiennes also inspired Kobold to take up adventure himself. They started small, with a half-marathon — specifically, a race in Seaton, U.K. also known as “the Grizzly” for its rugged terrain. When Fiennes took off and left him in his dust, Kobold (then 19) got bored, wandered off the course and took a short-cut through pastures, where he was chased by cows, a sheep dog, and a farmer with a pitchfork, before emerging just a few blocks from the finish. He picked up his jog, crossed the finish line and was awarded third place in another, shorter race — for boys 14 and under. He’d arrived so early that adults were still a good hour from finishing.
Seriously, you could not make this stuff up.
Later, Fiennes convinced him to run the New York City Marathon for BBC TV and Kobold agreed. He showed up for a 26-mile race not having completed a single training run lasting more than a mile. “Right before the race Ran said ‘You don’t have to do this,’” Kobold recalls. “He called me ‘disgracefully unfit.’ I was so pissed that I finished the marathon.”
If this is starting to sound like Forrest Gump, I hear you. I was sure that Kobold’s stories were just good marketing; they were not. When he tells you he hunted Nazi war criminals across Europe, serving as German translator and man mostly likely to knock on the door of a fugitive Nazi on the lam, he is telling the truth. You can read about it in Fiennes autobiography, “Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know” or in the slightly fictionalized version told in the novel “The Secret Hunters.”
Two years ago, Kobold accompanied Fiennes on the then-63-year-old Briton’s attempt at Mt. Everest. Kobold was there only as support but in his boredom he began to wander up the mountain’s icy flanks, playing with ice axes and crampons until he’d mastered the basics of negotiating somewhat treacherous, snow- and ice-covered terrain. (He’d already worked out the hiking part, having trekked for 10 days just to get there.)
When Fiennes decided to come back the next year (his 2008 effort failed due to weather), he was concerned that his summit bid might fail again and that he would incur the wrath of the cynical British tabloid press.
Kobold, who by now was planning his own expedition to Mt. Everest in support of injured U.S. veterans, offered the intrepid explorer a way to conceal his plans to reach the summit by way of an elaborate ruse. Fiennes would pose as a base camp-bound documentary film maker intent on covering his young friend’s efforts to scale Mt. Everest. Both men, meanwhile, had every intention of actually reaching the summit together.
Keep in mind that Mike Kobold is not a mountain climber. He’s not even a rock climber, or a runner, or a particularly adept athlete who gets excited about sports. He’s athletic enough, sure, but he’s hardly the guy you’d expect to climb Everest and that’s exactly what he did. And in the process he met his wife, Anita, the first Hungarian woman ever to summit Everest.
“It is a little unusual,” Kobold says of this accomplishment. “Like marrying the woman I met while walking to Everest.”
This year Mike and Anita will make their second attempt on the world’s tallest mountain, with one important difference: They will do it without supplemental oxygen. “According to some official mountaineering association it doesn’t count if you did it with oxygen,” says Kobold. “they must think it’s wimpish.” (I think he means wimpy, but he’s foreign, and you get the drift.) Kobold doesn’t actually believe he will reach the summit without supplemental oxygen and admits that he “will use it if it becomes absolutely necessary.” But he wasn’t very optimistic about his chances the previous year, and sure enough there he was, chasing Sir Ranulph Fiennes all the way to the summit.
He’s also doing it to complete another, more important, goal. Ever since the day Gandolfini introduced him to a disabled Navy SEAL, Kobold has been close to this elite branch of America’s special forces, and last year’s Everest mission wasn’t just to add to his impressive and odd resume. He did it to raise money for the Navy SEAL Warrior Fund, which supports SEALs wounded in combat. His ties to special forces, really, go back as far as Fiennes, a former officer in the British SAS, and from the beginning Kobold Watch Company’s tactical timepieces have been a favorite of SEALs, Army Rangers and Force Recon Marines.
When it came time to crash prepare for Everest, Kobold went to California and trained with the Navy SEALs on their base in Coronado. His costly, last-minute expedition had some impressive underwriters, but with the world’s economy cratering, the trip would never have happened if not for the last-minute appearance of Dr. Richard Fuisz, ex-CIA officer, co-founder of Fuisz Pharma and fan of Kobold watches. Fuisz swept in and made the expedition possible just when things seemed dire.
Naturally, Kobold waited until the last minute to plan this year’s trip, and just as naturally he’s aiming higher than ever: He hopes to raise $250,000 from the general public who is following the expedition online, to thank America’s wounded SEAL warriors for their service.
As with the first attempt, Team Kobold will be well equipped. In addition to him and his wife, it will include seven-time Everest climber Kenton Cool, patron and advisor Fiennes, and legendary expedition organizer Henry Todd. Returning sponsors North Face and Land Rover are expected to take part, as is Hershey’s Chocolate.
If the latter strikes you as an unusual name to be tied to a climbing expedition, you clearly haven’t heard about Kobold’s addiction to chocolate. Worn out by the horrifically bland cuisine at base camp during the 2008 trip, Kobold — who is never far from a jar of chocolate truffles and who can devour a dozen croissants or two steaks in a sitting — pleaded with his office to help remedy the dire situation. His co-workers answered the plea and shipped 50 pounds of Hershey’s chocolate bars to Kathmandu in a box. Because he’s not one to let logistics ruin a candy delivery, Kobold cajoled the owner of a rescue helicopter flying out to evacuate an injured climber to bring along the box of chocolate and his tent became the most popular in base camp. “Every night, these explorers were lining up for chocolate,” he says.
When Hershey’s read this account in the press, it offered to supply the 2009 mission and so Kobold’s sherpas carried 2,000 chocolate bars, along with countless Reese’s Pieces bags, to base camp last spring. Seven weeks later, they departed with just 24 bars remaining. To save you the math, that’s 1,976 bars eaten.
As with any Kobold adventure, you can expect the unexpected in 2010. You can also expect more chocolate.
God knows he might need it. Consider this story from last year’s mission: Mike, Anita, Kenton and Ran all summitted and were on their way down when fatigue caused them to walk at different paces. Ran went on ahead of Mike, who went ahead of Anita and the team leader Kenton Cool after passing Camp 3. Walking on his own, with no radio, Kobold missed Camp 2 entirely due to whiteout conditions and so forged on, knowing that he’d eventually find his way.
When his teammates — including his future wife — arrived at Camp 2 to find that Mike had not checked in, they feared the worst and when they radioed to base camp to announce that he was missing, a search-and-rescue mission was ordered. All available hands took part as sherpas and climbers began to comb the dangerous terrain, fearing that Kobold had plummeted into one of its many bottomless crevasses, lost forever to the mountain that swallows so many souls.
Kobold, meanwhile, had made his way to Camp 1, which had been abandoned earlier in the season. There, he sat waiting for Kenton and Anita to catch up to him. After an hour, he became bored and felt it was more hassle to go back up the mountain to Camp 2 in search of the rest of the team, than it would be to climb downhill, which makes sense when you think about it. “I decided to go on to base camp,” he says, and because he never found Camp 2, and had no radio, there was no way to tell anyone that he was fine. So he walked on down the mountain — navigating the deadly Khumbu Ice Fall alone — and when he finally walked into base camp four hours later, having no idea that he’d created a panic, he was greeted with astonished stares. “They looked at me like they’d seen a ghost,” he says.
Everyone, that is, but his old friend Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who had neglected to participate in the search and was nonchalantly snacking on Reese’s Pieces when Kobold wandered into camp.
“Good job young Mike,” Fiennes told him. “trust you to do things in an unconventional way.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.